Sometimes, cancelling a service that you don’t want or need anymore can be a giant pain in the behind. However, calling outside of regular business hours might turn the tide your way: The biggest tip is to call well outside of normal business hours — in my company, customer service was open 24/7, but the retention department closed in the evening. If you call, say, before bed, or during the middle of the night, you’ll just be talking to a regular CS rep who has no incentive whatsoever to keep you as a customer. It can turn a twenty minute phone call into a two minute phone call.
If you’ve ever had to deal with pushy reps this could be a lifesaver. What’s your best tip for getting out of services you don’t want? Thoughts in the comments.
How to cancel a service [Boing Boing]Because it’s so sturdy, dental floss has its uses beyond mouth hygiene. You can repair shoes with it, cut cakes with it, and keep your gadgets’ plastic caps intact with it. But did you know you could also sew with it, use it as a clothesline, tie a strong knot with it to keep your suitcase closed, and silence a dripping faucet? Traveler’s weblog Gadling suggests these tips and others without requiring extra baggage. What other hacks do you have for dental floss? Share your tips in the comments.
Clever Uses for Dental Floss [Gadling]US-centric: Find a local merchant fast with web application FastCall411, a tool that calls multiple businesses at one time and then connects you to the first business to pick up. FastCall411′s goal is to put an end to the days of flipping through your Yellow Pages calling one business at a time until you finally get ahold of someone. Right now the app only supports limited areas and services (I can only quickly get ahold of a plumber in Los Angeles), but in time it should have a pretty robust list of service offerings. If you happen to see a merchant you like in the search, you can also tell FastCall411 to dial only that merchant. Right now FastCall411 has a little way to go, but in time it could be an interesting and useful service. Alternately—if you’re feeling lonely—you could just use the demo on the front page to call up three of your friends and talk to the first one that answers.
FastCall411 [via Webware]As I mentioned on Friday, Australian Lifehacker readers attempting to visit the Lifehacker US are currently unable to get there, due to a broken website redirection. Currently, all of the Lifehacker related URLs (including us.lifehacker.com) are redirecting the AU site. This is *not* working as intended – usually you can hit the “US edition” button at the top of the Lifehacker AU site, or type us.lifehacker.com to travel to the US site. While Australian readers/RSS subscribers get *all* the US content plus additional local content, we understand that sometimes you want to go straight to the US site, and normally things are set up for you to do just that. Unfortunately the fix for this is out of our hands – but we’ve alerted our friends over at Gawker who look after Lifehacker in the US, and they’re working on a fix. Again, our apologies. It’s as frustrating to us as it is to you.
